Lately my kidneys have taken a hit due to dehydration, causing my Creatinine and BUN to rise. What the heck are Creatinine and BUN, you may ask? Your average person has probably never heard of them, so let me give you a brief anatomy lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia. Creatinine is a break-down product of creatine phosphate in muscle and is usually produced at a fairly constant rate by the body. Creatinine is chiefly filtered out of the blood by the kidneys, so if the filtering of the kidneys is deficient, creatinine blood levels rise. The blood urea nitrogen (BUN) is a test of the measure of the amount of nitrogen in the blood in the form of urea and a measurement of kidney function. Urea is a by-product from metabolism of proteins by the liver and is removed from the blood by the kidneys. Basically, all this means is that I have to run IV hydration at home for a few days to rehydrate myself and help my kidneys.
Today I was reflecting on all the ups and downs my kidneys have had over the past 2 years, with last July being the worst. That was when my HLH relapsed and my kidneys completely shut down within a matter of days. I stopped peeing entirely, an extremely strange phenomenon. You might think it sounds convenient (e.g. no more bathroom breaks during movies), but it was actually a very uncomfortable, awful feeling to sit on the toilet and literally have NOTHING come out, no matter how much I drank.
As a result, the renal team (i.e. kidney doctors) severely restricted my intake of fluids, allowing me to drink no more than 500-700 ml (about 1-1.5 water bottles) per day, with every drop accounted for on a whiteboard mounted on my bathroom door. I was constantly thirsty. I’ve never been much of a fan of alcohol, but man, did those beer commercials look good. My dreams were filled with tall glasses of ice water and frosty smoothies. I had to undergo kidney dialysis, a process I associated with weak, sickly, old people, never myself at 25 years old. Though the failure of my kidneys was sudden and severe, they recovered amazingly fast, allowing me to end dialysis within two weeks, rather than the two months or more originally predicted. That was just one of many miracles I experienced last year.
Yeah, the hydration causes me to make a couple more daily trips to the bathroom than usual. I’ll take that over dialysis any day.
Today I was reflecting on all the ups and downs my kidneys have had over the past 2 years, with last July being the worst. That was when my HLH relapsed and my kidneys completely shut down within a matter of days. I stopped peeing entirely, an extremely strange phenomenon. You might think it sounds convenient (e.g. no more bathroom breaks during movies), but it was actually a very uncomfortable, awful feeling to sit on the toilet and literally have NOTHING come out, no matter how much I drank.
As a result, the renal team (i.e. kidney doctors) severely restricted my intake of fluids, allowing me to drink no more than 500-700 ml (about 1-1.5 water bottles) per day, with every drop accounted for on a whiteboard mounted on my bathroom door. I was constantly thirsty. I’ve never been much of a fan of alcohol, but man, did those beer commercials look good. My dreams were filled with tall glasses of ice water and frosty smoothies. I had to undergo kidney dialysis, a process I associated with weak, sickly, old people, never myself at 25 years old. Though the failure of my kidneys was sudden and severe, they recovered amazingly fast, allowing me to end dialysis within two weeks, rather than the two months or more originally predicted. That was just one of many miracles I experienced last year.
Yeah, the hydration causes me to make a couple more daily trips to the bathroom than usual. I’ll take that over dialysis any day.
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